In Reply.—JAMA reaches a wide range of Chinese-speaking medical and health care specialists all over the world. There are over 1.25 billion Chinese-speaking people and not many of them have full command of the medical specialty involved, nor are there too many of them who have the expertise to select an appropriate Chinese term for levothyroxine that would be readily recognized and identified as such by all Chinese-speaking medical professionals.Since this appears to be a term that originated from the English language, we have attempted to stick to the timehonored principle of using the original term as it is unequivocally identified in the US Pharmacopoeia. The English language provides the largest number of identifiable words used by the human race in that it accounts for about 500 000 different words. The next language, with a comparable affinity to science and technology, is German, which accounts for some